Max EddyHostwinds VPNHostwinds offers fast and affordable VPN services, but it's a very limited offering with a confusing interface. Plus, a lack of specialty servers and no servers outside the US gives us pause.

Confusing interface. Lacks servers outside the US, and there's no way to select specific servers. No special features. Poor documentation.

Bottom Line

Hostwinds offers fast and affordable VPN services, but it's a very limited offering with a confusing interface. Plus, a lack of specialty servers and no servers outside the US gives us pause.

A laundry list of features isn't always a good thing, but in the crowded world of Virtual Private Network services (VPNs), it doesn't hurt to give consumers more value for their money. Hostwinds VPN, provided by the Editors' Choice winning Web-hosting company of the same name, can provide you a secure, fast connection, but it doesn't do much else and it's not particularly easy to use. I'd stick with our top picks, NordVPN and Private Internet Access, which are some of the best VPN services available.

What Is a VPN?A VPN is the simplest and best way to ensure that your Internet communications are safe from prying eyes. When you connect to a VPN, your Web traffic is sent through an encrypted tunnel to a secure server. From there, it heads out into the public Internet. Advertisers can't track you online, and government snoops have a much harder time reading your Web traffic.

VPNs sound fancy, but they have many day-to-day applications. Have you ever connected to an unsecured Wi-Fi network, maybe at a Starbucks? It's possible that someone was sitting on that network and intercepting everything you were sending out. With a VPN, you keep attackers like that at bay.

As a security and anonymizing tool, VPNs are often used by journalists and political dissidents operating in countries with restrictive Internet policies. Other people use VPNs for less serious pursuits. VPN services let you spoof your location, for example, making you appear to be in the same place as the VPN server you are connected to. Many people do this to gain access to region-locked content—online BBC streaming, for example. Of course, some services, such as Netflix, have gotten wise to this trick, and they go out of their way to block known VPN servers. A VPN service that can deliver a Netflix stream overseas one day may be blocked the next.

Pricing and FeaturesOn the Hostwinds website (which is mainly dedicated selling subscriptions to the Hostwinds Web hosting service) the company promises security and anonymity with its VPN product, along with support for multiple devices and a promise not to throttle your bandwidth. That's a good start, but it's disappointing that this service doesn't include more. It encrypts your traffic and hides your IP address, but it does little else.

I had to contact Hostwinds to answer basic questions about what the service provides, as I couldn't find the information online. I was told that HostWinds uses both OpenVPN and PPTP protocols. The company has just 30 and 40 servers, all housed at the same locations as HostWinds' Web hosting operations in Seattle and Dallas. A European option is expected to come online early next year. Most other services offer far more servers in more locations, but HostWinds' representative pointed out that their company offers fast, powerful infrastructure not often used by other VPN services. That might alleviate some speed-related concerns, but it doesn't help much if you want to appear to be using an overseas IP address—a major reason people use VPNs, as mentioned above.

One month of service with Hostwinds costs $8, billed monthly. You can also spring for six-month and one-year packages for $5 and $3.33 per month, respectively. That's the same price as Editors' Choice winner NordVPN, but cost alone isn't a fair comparison. NordVPN lets you choose from a geographically diverse selection of VPN servers and provides specialty servers, including one for high-speed video streaming. NordVPN can even route your connection through the anonymizing Tor network. It also has a simple installation process and elegant user interface.

Our other Editors' Choice winner, Private Internet Access, is harsher on the eyes, but includes tons of features and thousands of available servers. It costs $6.95 per month. Spotflux Premium costs only $4.99 per month and has ad-blocking, malware protection, and the best-looking VPN interface I've seen.

The HostWinds VPN website doesn't play up one of the service's best features: unlimited device access. For just one fee, you can connect as many devices as you want. I haven't seen another offering that generous. Just about every other VPN service offers five or six licenses with just as many simultaneous connections. TorGuard VPN even sells a router with its software preinstalled, to protect everything in your home, from your smart fridge to your PlayStation 4.

Currently, HostWinds VPN only offers a standalone application for Windows. But because the company's service uses OpenVPN, any device that can run the OpenVPN client can be configured to work with HostWinds VPN. That includes mobile devices. That's good to know, but seems antithetical to HostWinds' goal of offering simple, transparent VPN.

Hands OnWhen you sign up for Hostwinds' VPN, you're sent a username and password for the VPN in plaintext in an email. I've seen other VPN services do this to help provide anonymity, since it separates your personal and payment information from your VPN login, but I think it's annoying. It's also confusing, especially if you don't know to look for the confirmation email.

I tested Hostwinds on a Dell Latitude E7250 laptop running Windows 8.1. Installation was fairly straightforward, although finding the installer and documentation for the application isn't easy.

The actual Hostwinds application is minimal—too minimal, for my taste. It has fields for your login credentials, a check box that configures the software to log you in automatically, and another to launch the application on startup. The window can be expanded to give you more information about your VPN connection, but that info will be unintelligible to the average person. If using the (honestly, ugly) app isn't to your liking, though, you can close the window and click the HostWinds icon in the system tray instead.

I'm told that HostWinds wanted to create an application that didn't bother the user. It's true, it can be configured once and then ignored. But I find the main window to be rather confusing. This is partly because it doesn't use the standard Windows template, instead using custom close and expand icons, and partly because it doesn't show the basic tools of a VPN, such as buttons to connect or disconnect. These are handled by the notification tray icon, although you'll have to figure this out for yourself.

Speed TestsNo matter which VPN service you use, it will have an impact on your Internet connection. Most of the time, the process of encryption and rerouting Web requests slows down browsing. But sometimes, as in the case of PureVPN, it actually speeds things up. When I spoke with HostWinds, the company representative stressed the desire to not impede users' Web browsing.

To that end, HostWinds is focused on providing a fast and reliable connection. For most Americans, that means high-speed servers in the US. That's exactly what HostWinds offers, but at the cost of some basic features offered by competitors.

Reviewing Hostwinds presented a challenge to my normal speed-test protocol, because I couldn't change my VPN server. Normally, I select a server in Australia, to test the service under extreme conditions. Because that wasn't possible with HostWinds, I instead connected NordVPN to a United States based server and used that as a point of comparison.

In testing both Hostwinds and NordVPN, I averaged the results from benchmarking services Speedof.me and Ookla's Speedtest.net (the latter is owned by PCMag's publisher, Ziff Davis). I then compared those findings to a baseline, which I established by averaging the speed test results while the VPN was offline. Because network conditions can change at the drop of a hat, I run the baseline tests immediately after the VPN speed tests.

Compared with its baselines, Ookla reported an 11.2 percent increase in latency for Hostwinds VPN and Speedof.me reported a 122.9 percent increase. All of my tests have shown a dramatic difference in latency between both tests, with Speedof.me's readings being significantly higher. By comparison, Ookla reported a 17.9 percent increase for NordVPN and Speedof.me a 56.3 increase in latency. Latency is an important factor, but these numbers also need to be taken with a grain of salt; most people won't notice even a dramatic increase in latency, because it's measured in milliseconds.

As for upload and download speeds, Ookla showed a 6.3 and 4.13 percent decrease for Hostwinds VPN, respectively, and Speedof.me showed a decrease of 4.63 and 6.72 percent, respectively. Looking to NordVPN for comparison, that service decreased download and upload speeds by 9.7 percent and 10.14 percent, respectively, according to Ookla's measurements, and Speedof.me showed a 5.81 and a 5.58 percent decrease, respectively, for NordVPN's upload and download speeds.

These are strong results for Hostwinds, and they translate into a solid user experience, too. Webpages loaded quickly while connected to Hostwinds, and YouTube videos loaded in HD by default. When I switched to 4K video, YouTube videos took much longer to load but could play back faster than what I experienced when connected to most other VPN services. Of course, if you're outside the US, you're likely to notice a significant decrease in performance.

Not Far Beyond BasicHostwinds sets out to create a fast and reliable service that can run all the time and protect all your information, and the inclusion of unlimited licenses makes it a tempting offer. Still, Hostwinds is best known for its Web hosting, and the VPN ultimately feels more like an additional service to tack on while you build your website than a standalone product.

It comes with some notable drawbacks. For one, the lack of worldwide server coverage means you won't be able to change your apparent location. It also means customers outside the US won't get as much benefit since they're far from the severs. For another, the focus on simplicity has created an interface that's actually more confusing and harder to use because it doesn't provide the user with much choice. It would helped if Hostwinds explained itself better, letting users know what it's doing and how it should be used. Better documentation would help here.

If you're setting up a Hostwinds account and are thinking of throwing in a VPN subscription while you're at it, I'd advise you to look elsewhere. Check out our Editors' Choice winners Private Internet Access and NordVPN, or any of the excellent free VPN services we've reviewed.

Hostwinds VPN

Bottom Line: Hostwinds offers fast and affordable VPN services, but it's a very limited offering with a confusing interface. Plus, a lack of specialty servers and no servers outside the US gives us pause.

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About the Author

Max Eddy is a Software Analyst, taking a critical eye to Android apps and security services. He's also PCMag's foremost authority on weather stations and digital scrapbooking software. When not polishing his tinfoil hat or plumbing the depths of the Dark Web, he can be found working to discern the 100 Best Android Apps.
Prior to PCMag, Max wrote... See Full Bio

Hostwinds VPN

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